Thursday, March 6, 2014

Using Images to Promote Thought

The
way in which an individual engages with Chris Ware’s work Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid in the
World allows him or her to understand or not understand the story being
told. A simple reading of the words in
the comic boxes is not sufficient to fully grasp all the material being
expressed to the reader. Without
observing the images for their exquisite details, the reader can miss a lot of
useful information and insights to the story.
Not only do the images take a strong role in portraying the depth of the
story line with more detail, they also leave the reader the opportunity to make
their own inferences about different parts of Jimmy Corrigan’s life that are
not explicitly told by the story itself.

One
such set of images I want to analyze in more detail in this paper is the set of
frames where Jimmy is thinking of what it will be like to see his father for
the first time. He is sitting on the
plane after the woman next to him confronted him about staring at her breasts
and he goes into a short panel of different looking guys saying different
things to him. In a way, after the three
initial greeting ones, they are actually a complete first conversation with Jimmy but with all the
guys in succession portraying one person. At first glance the reader
notices the eyes are blacked out in all of them. This does not make sense until the second to
last panel, where the guy in the yellow shirt says “. . . you’ve got your
mother’s eyes, you know . . .” (Ware). From
this, the reader can infer Jimmy was probably told by his mother or other relatives
that he looks like his father, except that he has his mother’s eyes. So here Jimmy is actually attempting to
picture himself at an older age to represent his father, but he leaves the eyes
out of it because he simply does not know what color they would be.

This
specific scene would not be so influential to the reader if the pictures were
not there to help represent what is going through Jimmy’s head. At this point in the story we know that he is
going to see his father, however it has not been made as obvious that he has never seen his father. To represent the
anxiousness and curiosity going through Jimmy’s head, this scene was added to
help the reader understand the situation.
From the images we can tell Jimmy really knows nothing about what his
father will be like. Each father figure appears
to have a defining characteristic. All
of them definitely look as though they could be Jimmy at an older age but each
one has different clothes or different facial structures from one another.

To
the reader this expresses not only that Jimmy really has no idea what his
father might look like but it might also give some insight into what Jimmy
thinks he might eventually look like. In
order to do this, the reader needs to focus on the similarities between all the
guys. For example, all their clothes
look relatively nice. He does not portray
his father as a disgusting slob in any of these frames. There’s a lot the reader can speculate from
this small detail. One thing they could
infer is that Jimmy believes his father is rather successful because he did not
have a family to support and a child to raise.
Even farther, the reader could take the crude perspective towards women
that is present in Jimmy Corrigan and
say the perspective fathers look rather well-off because they did not have
wives to keep them from their dreams. It’s
a bold assumption to make but does seem to follow along with the book’s ideals.

So
much can be analyzed and interpreted from the images present in novel. The storyline is rather sporadic with the
random jumps between the real world and Jimmy’s conscious or subconscious
thought takeovers. Without the images,
the reader would be rather confused about the plot of the story. Not only do the pictures help the story, they
also manage to tell a story all on their own, stories that are not directly
written in the words. The small section
of Jimmy trying to guess what his father looks like expresses this idea very
well. Without the pictures, the reader
could misunderstand that Jimmy has not seen his father before but they would
also miss the opportunity to think about why Jimmy would portray his father
with these different characters in his mind.

2 comments:

The first paragraph doesn't actually say anything in particular. The general insight is ok, but it should be made more specific.

The second paragraph does something interesting and important - you are making inferences through a combination of the words and pictures, escalating to a meaning that, if not precisely hidden, certainly isn't on the surface, either.

The paragraph about *why* his father is shown as being nicely dressed is smart but wanders too much. If you revise, what you'd ideally do is take a stand (at least a limited or partial one) on what the father's clothing means. Mind you, I think your explanations are good - but that means that they're worth further investigating and defending (looking for evidence elsewhere in the text, not just here).

The conclusion doesn't do much.

If I wanted to, I could boil this essay down to about two paragraphs. Those two paragraphs would be good - there are excellent ideas here - but rather than starting with this initial analysis and then either a) getting deeper into the details on the page or b) looking elsewhere to continue your analysis of, e.g., what the father's clothing means, you ramble instead.

So - more of the good, clear thinking, with less padding around it and more development of the good material.

I actually analyzed the same exact picture as you, and still found your essay to be quite insightful. I think that you made some particularly good points in your essay. For instance, I like how you infer that the reason Jimmy’s potential father figures have their eyes blacked out is because Jimmy is told he has his mother’s eyes. Thus, Jimmy has no idea what his dad’s eyes would be like, but has a good idea of what the rest of him looks like. Also, I like how you take one detail like that they are dressed nicely and use that to speculate that Jimmy’s father is wealthy because he does not have a woman to take care of.

If you were to revise this essay, maybe you could add different possibilities for some of your observations to allow your argument to be more well-rounded. Also, on a small side-note, you get the title of the graphic novel wrong, as it is Jimmy Corrigan: the Smartest Kid on Earth, not Jimmy Corrigan the Smartest Kid in the world.